mallove - fire from ice - searching for the truth behind the cold fusion furor (1991)

"Eugene Mallove has produced a sorely needed, accessible overview of the cold fusion muddle. By sweeping away stubbornly held preconceptions, he bares the truth implicit in a provocative variety of experiments." —Julian Schwinger Nobel Laureate in Physics "Mallove brings dramatically to life the human side of this important scientific controversy, which has tapped the emotions of its scientific participants in a way usually typical only of major scientific revolutions. Fire from Ice is highly recommended reading for anyone who is interested in the nature of scientific controversy and scientific change. I frankly could not put the book down once I had started it." —Dr. Frank Sulloway, former MacArthur Fellow Science historian, MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society "Fire from Ice is a masterpiece of science documentation. Progress in deciphering the cold fusion effect is now stalemated by an establishment pressure for conformity. An authoritative book needed to be written, and it had to come from someone with roots in both the science and the journalism communities; there are very few people in the world as qualified as Eugene Mallove is to write it and give the story the meticulous attention it required." —Dr. Henry Kolm, cofounder of MIT's Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory The inside story of a scientific discovery that could have an enormous impact on the life of every reader The Fleischmann and Pons cold fusion effect: A genie in a bottle that could rescue the world from its destructive dependency on fossil fuels, or a pipe dream advanced by brilliant, overzealous, and ultimately self- deluded scientists? And if cold fusion has been achieved, what explains the indifference, if not downright hostility throughout much of the scientific community and in the popular press? In Fire from Ice, Eugene Mallove answers these questions and many more. Offering the prospect of clean, safe, and unlimited energy, nuclear fusion has long been the shining hope for a world disastrously de- pendent on dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. Two generations of the brightest scientific minds and billions of dollars have been devoted to designing and building experimental reactors that mimic the un- imaginably extreme temperatures and pressures needed to produce nuclear reactions akin to those that power the Sun and the stars. Then, suddenly, in the spring of 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, research chemists at the University of Utah made an announcement that rocked the scientific world and made front-page news for months to follow. Their claim to have achieved nuclear fusion in a simple tabletop experiment and at room temperature defied sacrosanct conventional physical theories. And the scientific establishment would not take that challenge of cold fusion lying down. Within hours, even as the press was proclaiming a possible new era of unlimited clean energy, cries of disbelief and accusations of scientific misconduct and even fraud were heard from within professional circles. Researchers in laboratories around the world mobilized in an unprecedented effort to explain Pons and Fleischmann's experiments. A mountain of confusing, seemingly contradictory results began to pile up. Soon, leading scientific journals were regularly publishing cold fusion obituaries, and bitter editorials questioning the methods and motives of the cold fusion pioneers. Cold fusion was dead or was it? Almost unnoticed, a steadfast group of hundreds of optimistic researchers around the world continues to search for a solution to the tantalizing cold fusion enigma. In Fire from Ice, astronautical engineer and well-known author, Eugene Mallove, sheds a new and very different light on the "cold fusion confusion." Based on personal interviews with many of the people involved, as well as his firsthand experiences in laboratories and scientific conferences, he offers a unique insider's view of that divisive controversy, while at the same time clearly explaining the relevant science and technol- ogy. And Dr. Mallove convincingly argues that cold fusion may yet prove to be real. A story of scientific ambition and professional rivalry, political intrigue and hard science, Fire from Ice is the fascinating account of one of the most intense and momentous scientific controversies of all time. About the author Eugene Mallove, ScD, is Chief Science Writer for the MIT News Office, a former syndicated science writer for major newspapers and magazines, and the well-known author of the popular The Quickening Universe and The Star- flight Handbook. Dr. Mallove holds advanced degrees in astro-nautical engineering and environmental science. Science is magic that works. Kurt Vonnegut To all who have struggled to bring the fire of stars down to Earth. To seekers of Truth, everywhere. Great is truth. Fire cannot burn, nor water drown it. Alexander Dumas the Elder, The Count of Monte Cristo, 1841-45 Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xvi 1 Prologue: Desperately Seeking Fusion 1 A Genie Shrugs Fusion Is Forever The Fusion Universe Star or Planet? What Is Fusion? 2 A Brief History of Hot Fusion 17 The Prehistory of Hot Fusion The Fission Prelude Fusion Comes to Earth Magnetic Confinement Fusion Small Stars Are Born: Inertial Confinement Fusion 3 Claiming the "Impossible" 34 March 23, 1989 Fusion by Electrochemistry? A "Preposterous" Experiment Is Born A Tale of Two Universities Immediate Aftermath 4 A Frenzy of Replicators 63 The Days After Taking the Plunge "Confirmations" Roll In Utah Money 5 Dallas and Beyond 76 Texas Chemistry Beyond Dallas On the Defensive Cold Fusion Goes to Washington The Approaching Storm 6 The Prehistory of Cold Fusion 102 An Amazing Element Of Airships and Cigar Lighters Fleischmann's Dream The Other Cold Fusion Fusion in the Earth? 7 The Beginning of Wisdom 114 A Skeptical Theorist Burning Midnight Oil The Press Conference That Wasn't Theories Cooking 8 Yes, We Have No Neutrons 131 The Closing Vise An MIT "Bombshell" Nuclear War in Baltimore The Death of Cold Fusion: Greatly Exaggerated 9 New Mexico Sunrise 148 Some Heat, Some Light Steve Jones's Mother Earth Soup If It Quacks, It's a Duck! Defiance And More Heat Chemistry Won't Do Commandments for Cold Fusion Research 10 Evidence Builds and Skeptics Dig In 171 A Long Hot Summer Nature's Ill Wind Blows Strong Lukewarm Fusion The DOE Blast A Flawed Report A Not So Secret Meeting Foreign Influences 11 Denial and Acceptance 189 Only Fire and the Wheel Open Questions 12 Approach to an Answer 199 It's Fire! Conquering the Coulomb Barrier Comprehending the Mystery 13 The Turning Point 210 The End of Nature? Journey to Salt Lake Real Heat Sharp Theories Tritium, Neutrons, and More All's Well That Ends Well 14 Still Under Fire 233 An Unseemly Missive A Shining Star Falls Enter a "Fraud Buster" Return to the Beginning 15 Whither Cold Fusion? 245 Here Today, Here Tomorrow Proof Positive? Open Questions Funding Applied Cold Fusion? Fusion of Any Flavor 16 Fusion Confusion and Scientifico-Media Madness 263 Giants from the Big Apple The Problem Cold Fusion and Superconductivity at High Temperature A Dash Through Media Land 17 Hard Lessons in Science 277 Resistance to Paradigm Shifts The Majority Fails to Rule Dangerous Analogies The Pathology of "Pathological Science" Ockham's Razor Theory Versus Experiment Peer Review The Fear of Error Vested Interests Wishful Science or a Wish Come True? 18 Whither Hot Fusion? 291 Antimagnetic Personality Going for Broke or Going Broke? Doubting Hot Fusion Neutronless "Hot" Fusion? The Great Blue Hope 19 Epilogue 303 Whence We Came, Where We Stand, and Where We Are Going Cold Fusion: Fact or Fiction? Cold Fusion: What It Isn't Present Evidence A Fusion Resource Guide 309 Preface It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. When this happens, the most well-informed men become blinded by their prejudices and are unable to see what lies directly ahead of them. Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1963 The discovery of fission has an uncommonly complicated history; many errors beset it Above all, it seems to me that the human mind sees only what it expects. Emilio G. Segre "The Discovery of Nuclear Fission," December 1988 The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformations of these atoms is talking moonshine. Physicist Ernest Rutherford, about 1930 SKEPTICS HAVE WRITTEN A HUNDRED OBITUARIES for cold fusion, the unprecedented "miracle or mistake" that burst out of Utah into the public arena on March 23, 1989, but despite many unanswered questions about what "cold fusion" is or is not, evidence for the phe- nomenon (or phenomena) is now much too compelling to dismiss. Some would call the scientific clues only provocative. I choose to say compelling. With an electric power supply hooked up to palladium and plati- num electrodes dipped in a jar of heavy water spiked with a special lithium salt, chemists Martin Fleischmann and B. Stanley Pons were thought to have unleashed one of the wildest goose chases in the history of science. Now there is a significant possibility that they have discov- ered a quite revolutionary phenomenon that—along with hot fusion- could conceivably turn the world's oceans into bottomless fuel tanks. Cold fusion is very likely to be real after all, although which aspects of it are valid remains in question. Despite many roadblocks that arose x against confirming it as a new physical phenomenon, it is now here to stay. For a time, negative experiments and widespread skepticism seemed to have put cold fusion permanently on ice. Incredulity still runs deep. But cold fusion research is now very much alive in laboratories far and wide. It moves forward through those scientists with intense curiosity and courage to pursue these studies in the face of mountains of ridicule. It is now reasonably clear that fusion reactions that liberate energy— near but very peculiar relatives of nuclear processes that are the lifeblood of the stars—can occur at room temperature. There is no chance what- ever that cold fusion is a mistake. There is the exceedingly remote pos- sibility that "cold fusion" is a collection of many mistakes made in nuclear measurements of many different kinds, in heat measurements of great variety, and in all manner of control experiments. But to believe that hundreds of scientists around the world have made scores of systematic mistakes about the nuclear and nuclear-seeming anomalies that they have reported is to stretch credulity to the breaking point—to distort the meaning of scientific evidence to absurd limits. Coldfusion is not "path- ological science" as many have charged, but for critics to continue to describe it as such or to ignore it completely is pathological. Current evidence suggests that nuclear processes are actually at work in what at first seemed to be merely table-top chemical experi- ments. This is absolutely shocking, and the root of widespread disbelief in cold fusion among scientists. There has been no more iron-clad prin- ciple separating chemistry from physics than that chemical behavior never leads to nuclear transformations. The tiny atomic nucleus has been inviolate to assault, but now it has been breached by the puffy electron cloud world of chemistry. You see, if the tiny, dense nucleus of an atom were blown up to the size of a golf ball, at that scale its attending fuzzy little electrons would orbit a mile away. Chemistry has only to do with how these distant electrons interact to make connections and disconnections among atoms. Atomic nuclei never become directly involved in chemical reactions and nuclei had not been known to react with one another except in extreme high-energy conditions. Though the occurrence of cold fusion phenomena at present is erratic, it might some day be tamed and made regular and useful. Many experimenters are finding specific conditions, not reported initially by Drs. Fleischmann and Pons (perhaps not even known to them at the time), that prompt the effects. Furthermore, cold fusion phenomena are now seen in very dissimilar but related physical systems: pressurized gas cells, electrochemical cells with molten metal salts, and metal chips and films alloyed with fusion fuel. To an extent, the phenomena remain not repeatable at will—but repeatable, to be sure, in a statistical sense, and sometimes now with [...]... subsequently around the world led scientists to reexamine a decades-long pursuit: the quest to tame nuclear fusion The struggle has been to bring this power of the stars down to Earth, much as fabled Prometheus snatched fire from the gods The interest of the scientific community and the public at large was temporarily galvanized by the idea that a new kind of fusion process, immediately dubbed cold fusion, might... fraction of the millions of cubic kilometers of water for fuel to produce power for an energy-hungry globe, it would be infinitely better than achieving the alchemists' goal of turning base metals into gold One way or another, the vision of harnessing the world's oceans to that end will come true In researchers the world over, the dream of wrenching fire from ice is alive: fusion power, the fire of stars,... stars, taken from icy water The clever Prometheus of Greek legend merely stole fire from Zeus, the chief deity, and returned it to humankind More audacious, fusion scientists have been struggling for four decades—roughly since the birth of the idea of fusion bombs—to steal the fire of stars from ordinary water Because water is so cold (on a relative scale being but a few hundred degrees above the absolute... MW fusion power plant for one year! There is obviously more than enough fusion fuel to go around, but before we can use it, we have a lot to learn * The Fusion Universe Look up in the sky on a dark night and you will see thousands of bright fusion reactors the stars The Sun is the fusion reactor that keeps us alive If plants were to die for lack of fusion- produced starlight, the animal kingdom would... resistance of cold fusion research, in October 1990 scientists in several laboratories confirmed the nuclear creation of high-energy nuclei—probably those of tritium atoms—that fly out from titanium chips infused with the well-known fusion fuel, deuterium The measurements of power in the form of heat coming from some cold fusion cells is extraordinarily impressive—tens, to over a thousand, times the energy... before the K.) * Star or Planet? It is not strictly true that without the fusion reactions of the Sun, the temperature of our planet would approach that of deep space—about 3 K When the rocky Earth and the other planets formed some 4.5 billion years ago from a cloud of primordial debris that was enriched with the heavier elements of exploded stars, radioactive atoms were mixed into the recipe for the. .. But the key phenomenon in fusion its defining characteristic—is the formation of a more massive nucleus and the release of energy in a number of forms, whether in the velocity of particles such as neutrons or protons, in penetrating powerful radiations called gamma rays (like X rays, only much more energetic), or in other mechanisms that some have hypothesized for cold fusion The resulting mass of the. .. has also made news in the cold fusion controversy, because researchers have claimed to have observed it in numerous cold fusion experiments If this tritium is really being generated and is not the result of contamination, then cold fusion is proved Thousands of scientists and engineers around the world have been working for decades to harness the power of these hot fusion reactions They heat plasmas to... to produce fusion To confine the plasma, they typically work with torus-shaped (donut-shaped) vessels called tokamaks pervaded by high-intensity magnetic fields, or they assault sometimes frozen pellets of fusion fuel with intense laser beams from many directions at once The hot fusioneers have reached the threshold of the Genie's inner sanctum and are knocking on his door Are they seeking fusion desperately... What Is Fusion? The idea behind fusion is really very simple Two light-weight* nuclei come together and stick to one another or fuse, forming a nucleus of greater weight than either of the two reactant nuclei In creating the new nucleus, this fusion process may also include the ejection of one or more subnuclear particles such as a positive electrically charged proton or a chargeless neutron, or other . are the lifeblood of the stars—can occur at room temperature. There is no chance what- ever that cold fusion is a mistake. There is the exceedingly remote pos- sibility that " ;cold fusion& quot;. News Office, a former syndicated science writer for major newspapers and magazines, and the well-known author of the popular The Quickening Universe and The Star- flight Handbook. Dr. Mallove. A Genie Shrugs Fusion Is Forever The Fusion Universe Star or Planet? What Is Fusion? 2 A Brief History of Hot Fusion 17 The Prehistory of Hot Fusion The Fission Prelude Fusion Comes to